Here's the "Cornerstone Speech" by Vice President Alexander Stephans, who said in 1861 the CSA was founded on the idea that "the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery–subordination to the superior race–is his natural and normal condition." https://t.co/3eqXbxUfBfpic.twitter.com/4QUu7E9t4w

But if you won't read them, here's my former colleague Jim McPherson, noting how the war was absolutely about slavery and southern arguments shifted to "states' rights" only very late in the game. https://t.co/eBQlDETkup

If that institution was discredited in the eyes of the world, then the Confederacy itself would be discredited in the eyes of history. So, it became a psychological necessity, I think, to deny that the Civil War was about slavery.

2/ Lee certainly did not believe slavery was wrong. In an 1856 letter to his wife, he said "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race."

3/"How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence," Lee concluded. In other words, it was up to God, not Man, to abolish slavery. This was a typical slaveholder dodge one would hear throughout this era. Lee was no different.

4/ If you read Elizabeth Prior Brown's biography of Lee, you'd learn that Lee broke up every family on his plantation by 1860 by either renting or selling them apart. He once ordered an enslaved man whipped, and then had brine poured over his back. No "Christian Gentleman" here.

5/ As for the assertion that Lee "opposed secession," well, that's just dumb. He may have lamented the fact that secession had to occur, but there was never a choice when it came to the South or the Union: Lee wanted to protect Virginia, the South, and its "institutions"

6/Bear in mind that Lee forsook the oath he took to the Constitution and Union when he left the US Army, *where he was a career officer*, to join the Confederacy. One does not oppose secession and then take such a dramatic action to fight for…secession. pic.twitter.com/79AgOhJFyO

7/Lee consistently referred to Union forces as "those people," the enemy who threatened everything he and his state and region supposedly stood for. If you read the secession proclamations of the Confederate States, the preservation of slavery is clearly "what they stood for."

8/Don't just take my word for it-read Virginia's secession ordinance, condemning the federal govt for actions taken "*not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.*" [The emphasis is in the original document]

9/The inclusion of "slaveholding" in an important signifier. The South was seceding not just as "the South," but the "Slaveholding" South. When southern whites talked about "injuries" and "threatened rights" in the Union, they meant the fate of slavery. Full stop.

10/I'm not going to relitigate secession, because it's crystal clear from the documents and other evidence from the period that secession and the preservation of slavery were inextricably linked in the eyes of Confederates, whether or not they "owned" slaves themselves.

11/Read the letters of southern "secession commissioners" collected by Charles Dew in his excellent book _Apostles of Disunion_. Read the state secession convention debates. Read the letters. Read the Confederate Constitution. The perpetuation of chattel slavery suffuses it all

12/To deny that someone like Bob Ed Lee supported slavery or secession is to buy into the post-Civil War propaganda where eminent white southerners like Lee sought to softpedal their prewar and wartime stances to make themselves more palatable for re-entry into civil society. pic.twitter.com/yAYI9KRG43

13/even after the war, though, when Lee was president of Washington College, the school had a KKK chapter and there were two attempted lynchings on campus, which Lee turned a blind eye towards and did not punish the students involved. He continued to argue Blacks were "inferior"

14/The local chapter of the Freedmen's Bureau repeatedly charged Washington College students with abducting and raping Black girls. Lee–the PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE–never responded to any of the charges or cooperated with the Bureau to investigate.

15/Lee *testified in front of Congress* against black suffrage, arguing "the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power."

16/What @senatormcdaniel is doing here is giving you the santized version of Lee, the "marble man" myth-it's an image that has no basis in fact and is easily disproven by the historical record. I mean, this stuff isn't secret. pic.twitter.com/QaRjyYTBMX

17/But McDaniel and other Confederate apologists don't care. They ignore what the Confederates themselves said (read Alexander Stephenson's 1861 "cornerstone speech, FFS) and peddle this racist, whitewashed version of history where the Confederates were "heroes."

18/But to do so, to deny Lee was a supporter of slavery and secession, is to deny that the Civil War occurred because a substantial white regional minority refused to abide by the results of a legal election because they saw it as threatening their "right" to own other people pic.twitter.com/Hvwz5Ou8k7

19/ So, @senatormcdaniel, you have a curious way of defining "The Truth," but I suspect you're more interested in dog-whistling to anti-Black racists than you are in historical accuracy. Because your assessment of Lee flies in the face of all available historical evidence. pic.twitter.com/S5pnQSXcFQ

2. But for many cyclically-poor landless whites, esp in the cotton South (abt 1/3 white pop), there was no desire to fight & die to protect slave property. They even realized that their lives were negatively impacted (socio-economically) by the "peculiar institution."

4. (Important:) Most poor whites FULLY REALIZED they could never afford a purchase a slave. Most never owned more than a few dollars cash at the richest point in their lives. There was no credit for poor people.

6. In the 1850s, non-slaveholding laborers were forming nascent unions, demanding protection from competition w brutalized slave labor. These unions met throughout the South, & some even threatened to withdraw their support for slavery altogether -it hurt their prospects & wages.

7. By eve of war, slaveholders used racist media to try to scare lower class whites into supporting secession, predicting that they'd be raped & slaughtered by the thousands in an inevitable race war following emancipation. If they lived, slaveholders said, they'd be white slaves pic.twitter.com/wzEevT0Gy1

14. of poor men forced at the point of bayonets, or who were arrested for vagrancy & then forced to join are common. (2) PAY. Already trapped in cyclical un-& under-employment, this was a steady & decent wage. Good-excellent, life-changing $ for substitutions,etc. (3) LAND. prior

18 (FIN). The slave regime of the South – the #Confederacy – needs to be remembered for what it was. In 1867 Union General John Pope wrote a letter to Ulysses Grant, expressing his concerns about how the Civil War—and the causes of the Confederacy—would be remembered in history: pic.twitter.com/ENsc9hXMk8

I do think it's important to show that although all whites benefited from racism & white supremacy, that does not mean that there weren't deep class divisions and some white southerners who hated both slavery & the Confederacy.

Slavery was the underlying reason that South Carolina, followed by ten other states, left the Union. In 1860, leaders of the state were perfectly clear about why they were seceding. On Christmas Eve, they signed a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” Their first grievance was “that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations,” specifically this clause, which they quote: “No person held to service or labour in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up . . .” This is of course the Fugitive Slave Clause, under whose authority Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which South Carolina of course approved. This measure required officers of the law and even private citizens in free states to participate in capturing and returning African Americans when whites claimed them to be their slaves. This made the free states complicit with slavery. They wriggled around, trying to avoid full compliance. Pennsylvania, for example, passed a law recognizing the supremacy of the federal act but pointing out that Pennsylvanians still had the right to determine pay for their officers of the law, and they refused to pay for time spent capturing and returning alleged slaves. South Carolina attacked such displays of states’ rights:

But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations. . . . The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them.

Thus South Carolina opposed states’ rights when claimed by free states. This is understandable. Historically, whatever faction has been out of power in America has pushed for states’ rights. White Southerners dominated the executive and judicial branches of the federal government throughout the 1850s—and through the Democratic Party, the legislative branch as well—so of course they opposed states’ rights. Slave owners were delighted when Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney decided in 1857 that throughout the nation, irrespective of the wishes of state or territorial governments, blacks had no rights that whites must respect. Slave owners pushed President Buchanan to use federal power to legitimize slaveholding in Kansas the next year. Only after they lost control of the executive branch in the 1860 election did slave owners begin to suggest limiting federal power.

South Carolina’s leaders went on to condemn New York for denying “even the right of transit for a slave” and other Northern states for letting African Americans vote. Before the Civil War, these matters were states’ rights. Nevertheless, South Carolina claimed the right to determine whether New York could prohibit slavery within New York or Vermont could define citizenship in Vermont. Carolinians also contested the rights of residents of other states even to think differently about their peculiar institution, giving as another reason for secession that Northerners “have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery.” In short, slavery permeates the document from start to finish. Of course, the election of Lincoln provided the trigger, but the abiding purpose of secession was to protect, maintain, and enhance slavery. Nor was South Carolina unusual; other states used similar language when they seceded.

Despite this clear evidence, before 1970 many textbooks held that almost anything but slavery—differences over tariffs and internal improvements, the conflict between agrarian South and industrial North, and especially “states’ rights”—led to secession. This was a form of Southern apologetics. Never was there any excuse for such bad scholarship, and in the aftermath of the civil rights movement most textbook authors came to agree with Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural “that slavery was somehow the cause of the war.” As The United States—A History of the Republic put it in 1981, “At the center of the conflict was slavery, the issue that would not go away.”

This is hard history, but as the states’ rights racists in our families reveal, we have to teach it and do a much better job than we have done so far.

It is often said that slavery was our country’s original sin, but it is much more than that. Slavery is our country’s origin. It was responsible for the growth of the American colonies, transforming them from far-flung, forgotten outposts of the British Empire to glimmering jewels in the crown of England. And slavery was a driving power behind the new nation’s territorial expansion and industrial maturation, making the United States a powerful force in the Americas and beyond.

Slavery was also our country’s Achilles heel, responsible for its near undoing. When the southern states seceded, they did so expressly to preserve slavery. So wholly dependent were white Southerners on the institution that they took up arms against their own to keep African Americans in bondage. They simply could not allow a world in which they did not have absolute authority to control black labor—and to regulate black behavior.

The central role that slavery played in the development of the United States is beyond dispute. And yet, we the people do not like to talk about slavery, or even think about it, much less teach it or learn it. The implications of doing so unnerve us. If the cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery, then what does that say about those who revere the people who took up arms to keep African Americans in chains? If James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, could hold people in bondage his entire life, refusing to free a single soul even upon his death, then what does that say about our nation’s founders? About our nation itself?

Slavery is hard history. It is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it.

We the people have a deep-seated aversion to hard history because we are uncomfortable with the implications it raises about the past as well as the present.

We the people would much rather have the Disney version of history, in which villains are easily spotted, suffering never lasts long, heroes invariably prevail and life always gets better. We prefer to pick and choose what aspects of the past to hold on to, gladly jettisoning that which makes us uneasy. We enjoy thinking about Thomas Jefferson proclaiming, “All men are created equal.” But we are deeply troubled by the prospect of the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, who bore him six children, declaring, “Me too.”

Literary performer and educator Regie Gibson had the truth of it when he said, “Our problem as Americans is we actually hate history. What we love is nostalgia.”

Slavery isn’t in the past. It’s in the headlines.

These recent events reveal, at least in part, how American schools are failing to teach a critical and essential portion of the nation’s legacy-the history and continuing impact of chattel slavery. Research for this report reveals that high school students don’t know much about the history of slavery in the United States, with only 8 percent able to identify it as the central cause of the Civil War. This should not be surprising, given that most adults wrongly identify “states’ rights” as the cause. Widespread ignorance about slavery, the antebellum South and the Confederacy persists to the present day, and is on display in controversies over monument removal in places like New Orleans, Louisiana, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where protests turned deadly in the summer of 2017. Students and adults alike may even hold fringe beliefs, including notions propagated by white nationalists, such as the idea that slavery wasn’t “so bad,” or that the Irish were enslaved.9 Few Americans acknowledge the role slavery played in states outside the South.

Teachers struggle to do justice to the nation’s legacy of racial injustice. They are poorly served by state standards and frameworks, popular textbooks and even their own academic preparation. For this report, we surveyed more than 1,700 social studies teachers across the country. A bare majority say they feel competent to teach about slavery. Most say that the available resources and preparation programs have failed them. Almost all regret this deficiency, recognizing that teaching the history of slavery is essential. When we reviewed a set of popular history textbooks, we saw why teachers felt a lack of support: Texts fail in key areas, including connecting slavery to the present and portraying the diversity of the experiences of the enslaved. State content standards, which are meant to set clear expectations for instruction, are scattershot at best, often making puzzling choices such as teaching about Harriet Tubman long before slavery, or equivocating on the cause of the Civil War. When we consider the available landscape of materials and expectations, it is no wonder that teachers struggle.

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